Victor Hugo
University of Bristol
Referring back to Jean Cocteau's famous description of Hugo as ‘un fou qui se croyait Victor Hugo’,1 the art critic Robert Hughes claimed that ‘so might a Chihuahua fix its tiny fangs in the ankle of a bull elephant’.2 Hughes's point is that various generations of artists have sunk their teeth into Hugo in the hope of delivering something of a death blow to his legend, but that such aggression has done little to slow down this cultural beast. The mammoth proportions of Hugo's renown may have provoked apprehension, but neither death nor would-be successors have been able to deny him the prominence that he so blatantly desired in his quest to become ‘Chateaubriand ou rien’.3 In France, Hugo is the superstar of Republicanism, who championed egalitarian rights and the abolition of the death penalty. The anecdote that God Himself was evicted from the Panthéon in 1885 so that Hugo could be interred there still meets with warm affection. Internationally, the twentieth-century globalization of the media age has only solidified Hugo's celebrity. Nearly 80 of the some 140 film and television adaptations of his work have been in a language other than French, while Les Misérables became the world's longest running musical in 2006, as well as achieving the distinction in 2002 of being the first Broadway production to be staged in mainland China.
Navigating the sheer magnitude of a phenomenon whose name adorns a street in every corner of France is a daunting prospect for any scholar. Two key problems are discernible within the enormous shadow that Hugo casts, and which Gustave Flaubert once fittingly described as ‘désespérant’.4 Firstly, the often passionate cultural responses to Hugo make any impartial analysis an especially difficult enterprise. His undeniable bravado and lack of measure cause as much admiration as exasperation, both of which inform receptions of his work as readily today as they did in Hugo's own time. What Stéphane Mallarmé saw as the ‘infamies immortelles’ of Hugo's socially-minded aesthetics,5 George Sand described as ‘la couleur des qualités’;6 what historian Alistair Horne believes to be ‘bombastic silliness’,7 the novelist Mario Vargas-Llosa hails as ‘lyrical intellectual fiction’.8 In particular, Hugo's indomitable self-confidence has underpinned his stereotypical image as the white-bearded grand homme, complete with the authority and immovability that so easily come with such a supremely patriarchal icon. The 1985 centenary of his death and 2002 bicentenary of his birth only reinforced this stereotype with their distinctly political agendas. During the latter, Claude Millet articulated widely held concerns that Hugo's name had been repeatedly exploited at both ends of the political spectrum. Neither the anniversary of Émile Zola's death nor the transfer of Alexandre Dumas's remains to the Panthéon could eclipse yet another moment of Hugo commemoration. Millet argued that Hugo's own oscillations back and forth between conservatism and liberalism had woven him into the very fabric of modern France's unstable political evolution: ‘Hugo parle de tout à tous.’9 Crucial to this widespread political appeal were the presidential elections in that year. Lionel Jospin's failure to advance, combined with Jean-Marie Le Pen's progression in the race, accelerated a scramble on both Left and Right to try and make sense of how the Republic had arrived at this astonishing point. Hugo's moral resilience quickly became an emblem of a lost political integrity. The Left could cite his near twenty-year defiance in exile of the Second Empire, while the Right found comfort in his condemnation and abandonment of the Commune. Hugo's grandeur was simultaneously seen to mirror the gloire of the whole of France, and demand for celebratory events in his honour soared. The Comédie Française was obliged to extend an already lengthy run of Ruy Blas well into the autumn, often with ninety-five per cent of tickets being sold. On both Left and Right, Hugo could serve as a figure of reassurance, compensating for the perceived erosion of Republican values. At the same time, however, he again fell prey to the expedient kind of stereotyping which overlooked his ‘dimension subversive inaliénable, qu'aucun ordre moral ne peut accepter’.10 Millet insists that, unlike other literary luminaries such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe or Voltaire whose place in cultural history is more consensual, Hugo stood as both the state's greatest advocate and her most formidable opponent. Such ambivalence at a time of deep political anxiety greatly sharpened the focus on the myths and fervours surrounding Hugo, diverting attention away from his actual work.
This interpretative minefield is made all the more precarious by a second difficulty, namely the vast range of media in which Hugo tirelessly operated. Hugo was a master of self-reinvention, ‘the Elvis or Madonna of the nineteenth century’.11 He commanded a chameleon-like quality that was entirely characteristic of his creativity as a Romantic. Something of a ‘Jack of all trades’ throughout his life, Hugo moved effortlessly back and forth between verse and narrative, between oration and visual art, page and stage. The proportions of this corpus are themselves an imposing testimony to his verve. During a near seventy-year writing career, he produced at least eight novels, nine plays, twenty-five collections of poetry and over 3,000 sketches and paintings, not to mention a torrent of critical and aesthetic essays. The contours of such an ever-shifting corpus subsequently diverge as much as they converge, resisting any overarching frameworks. Even Hugo himself gave up trying to draw his work into a single whole, eventually abandoning a preface he was writing in the 1860s that he had initially envisaged as an introduction to his entire œuvre.
From the 1950s onwards, Hugo studies (faute de mieux) have been responding to both these challenges with considerable success. Scholars have extensively rethought the stereotypes of the supposedly masterful wordsmith, which misinterpreted or dissociated the ways in which Hugo's Romanticism energized both the actual and the potential. Today, the emphasis is placed on the all-important ‘harmonie des contraires’ that Hugo privileges in the Préface de Cromwell in 1827, through which he continually forces diverse genres and positions to meet and compete within his work. A series of impulses that could be seen largely to gather around the poles of realism and idealism intermingle in an unsettled melting pot of styles which continually eludes classification. Indeed, what Malcolm Bowie called the ‘unhelpful elasticity’ of Romanticism as a term is stretched to sometimes unbearable ends by Hugo.12 Critics observe that the critical edge of much of Hugo's writing is blunted by a tendency to generalize but elsewhere sharpened by his eye for the particular, with his work oscillating between swelling rhetoric and clinical precision. His taste as a playwright for the overtly theatrical goes hand in hand with the credibility of his psychological and social observations, rendering the misfits of Notre-Dame de Paris at once subject to the conventions of tragedy and yet repeatedly self-determining. Where Les Misérables infuses prosaic description with poetic lyricism, Les Contemplations matches starry-eyed wonder with harrowing anxiety, while his sketches and paintings rely on the visual only to negate the possibilities of clear representation. Studies of Hugo now insist that these wild swings in tone and manner be kept in play, since such endless transformations rely on ‘la distance, jamais le divorce’, to borrow Paul Bénichou's extremely helpful formula; ‘la même loi double d’éloignement et de présence'.13 What has emerged with Hugo is a complicated sense of self that anticipates modernism's multiplicity. A figure of extreme contrasts as opposed to simple contradictions, Hugo surrenders to process with the minimum of conscious control. His components keep aligning and separating, revealing a ‘fractal imagination’ with no final term.14 Little wonder that he himself referred to his work as an ocean whose horizons were ever-receding and whose depths were undetermined.15
Coming in a post-war age, the timing of this critical renaissance was not by chance. As so often had been the case during his lifetime, the alignment of historical forces seemed to play in Hugo's favour. The Nazi invasion of Europe had prompted many Westerners to find in Hugo's writing an expression of their deepest emotions; ‘[they] understood the exile of Guernsey and the besieged Parisian of 1870 as never before’.16 Moreover, such renewed cultural relevance became apparent at a time when academic tastes were shifting towards the postmodern. A previous critical impatience with Hugo's flair for melodrama and fantastic plots was giving way to a growing willingness to appreciate his plurality of techniques and the more eccentric characteristics of his style. The role played by New Criticism in this post-war shift cannot be overstated. The advocacy of close reading and the rejection of criticism based on extra-textual sources began to encourage fresh readings of Hugo's work. Such readings could wrench themselves away not only from the prejudices and passions that the poet inspired, but also from the ideological practices that had dominated literary criticism for some time. The Realist aesthetic, for example, had long dismissed Hugo's imaginative writing style, with criticisms from Zola among others tainting receptions of Hugo's novels well into the twentieth century.
For the first time in the history of Hugo scholarship, the emphasis consequently moved from the titan behind the works to the works themselves. The cliché of the bourgeois mythmaker, unreflective and naïve in his optimism, itself became a debunked myth thanks to this shift. Far from accessing a supposedly authoritative truth, Hugo's work was pitched at the strongest level of subjectivity, with the dimensions of his thinking always vulnerable to redesign. The opening salvo in this assault on stereotype came at the very end of the 1940s with Jean-Bertrand Barrère's La Fantaisie de Victor Hugo. This three-volume study dispelled past illusions and explored Hugo's use of fantasy as one of dynamism rather than frivolous indulgence or mastery. Barrère insisted on the poet's conception of the imagination as a playful but purposive faculty, ‘ce jeu souriant’ between the diversity and unity that Hugo saw around him in nature.17 Rather than ignore the anxieties and uncertainties of the material world, Hugo was very much engaged with them in his cultivation of fantasy. A further critical landmark in this reappraisal of Hugo's imaginary came in 1963. Pierre Albouy's La Création mythologique chez Victor Hugo18 stressed that the poet embraced a tense exchange between the immanent and the transcendent through his emphasis on art as creation and not actuality. Five years later, the message was broadcast to an anglophone audience in Richard B. Grant's The Perilous Quest. Grant proposed that Hugo's genius was visionary rather than mimetic, generating indicative rather than representative images. Hugo's power of suggestion was therefore cut off from the traditional cosmic visions of classic mythology, ‘with the result that he would have to create for himself not only form but also meaning (if any)’.19 In 1969, Jean Gaudon's Le Temps de la contemplation helped expand this kind of methodological approach further still.20
But perhaps the most important development in criticism during the 1960s came with the translation of Mikhail Bakhtin's Rabelais and His World. At various stages in his book, Bakhtin linked the theory of the carnivalesque that he develops from Rabelais with the Romantic irony that he reads in Hugo's narratives. The celebration of the unorthodox and the inconclusive represents for Bakhtin the major pull that Rabelais's writing in fact held for Hugo in the Préface de Cromwell.21 Bakhtin compared the carnival with the Romantic grotesque and its inversion of aesthetic value. Since the grotesque is not only ‘l'horrible’ but also ‘le comique’,22 it is suitably matched to the carnival's festivity: ‘gay, triumphant, and at the same time mocking, deriding’.23 Bakhtin outlined how the carnivalesque unfolds a hybrid and self-renewing form that can topple oppressive ideologies in order to realize the ‘relative nature of all that exists’: ‘to consecrate inventive freedom, to permit the combination of a variety of different elements and their rapprochement, to liberate from the prevailing point of view of the world’.24 Bakhtin's reading pointed at Hugo's capacity to negate hierarchical distance between different positions. Complicating any semblance of order in this way, Bakhtin saw Hugo as anything but prescriptive or steadfast.
Within this reading lay a major implication that has significantly steered the course of Hugo studies. Bakhtin privileged Hugo's narrative writing for accessing a range of different generic levels at once. In his view, the lyric voice of poetry could vary from Realist to Symbolist, but could only select one genre at a time in which to speak. The novel, on the other hand, is essentially polyphonic, forcing genres to speak simultaneously within its own voice. Such dynamism placed Hugo's novels squarely on the critical agenda. France's greatest poet was swiftly becoming one of her greatest novelists as well, gradually taking his place in the canon alongside Honoré de Balzac, Flaubert and Zola. Facilitating this rediscovery was the 1969 publication of Jean Massin's chronological 
uvres complètes edition, bringing the works (and crucially the novels) together for the first time. The result was an increasingly thorough and wide-ranging body of narrative research in which two names in particular stand out. In 1984, Victor Brombert's seminal Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel25 engaged with each of Hugo's eight narratives to highlight the fragmentary tone of his writing. Kathryn Grossman has since brought greater precision still by embarking on a three-volume study of Hugo's novels in succession, across which she observes that Hugo's ‘fundamental playfulness’ persistently enables opposites to ‘mix rather than confuse’.26 More recently, particular aspects of the narratives have themselves also started to come under scrutiny, such as Hugo's use of laughter as a thematic and textual device, as well as his construction of character.27
This critical attention on narrative has been welcome, although not entirely unproblematic. By contrasting poetry's supposed ‘centripetal’ linguistic force with the ‘centrifugal’ power of narrative writing, Bakhtin eclipsed the former without really testing his readings on Hugo's verse. Bakhtin's presence on many a bibliography suggests that the lion's share of attention which Hugo's novels have received can in part be attributed to his contribution here, although we must not overlook their popular appeal either (not least in a cinematic age). In turn, Hugo's poetry and indeed his theatre have risked being sidelined, in spite of their arguable capacity to reflect in their own ways the dizzying aesthetics and techniques that are particular to the novels. Fortunately, several major studies have refused to allow either medium to be pushed offstage, even if both are denied the limelight occupied by the novels. Both Ludmila Charles-Wurtz and, especially, Henri Meschonnic have written captivating book-length analyses of Hugo's verse, while Anne Ubersfeld and Florence Naugrette remain authorities on the dramas.28 Likewise, Hugo's graphic art continues to be visible, as it were, thanks chiefly to the art historian Pierre Georgel. In 1971, in both Paris and London, Georgel organized the first great showing of Hugo's works since a posthumous exhibition in 1888 (which Van Gogh had referred to as ‘astonishing’).29 Georgel reminded yet another generation that Hugo's art, with its prominence of feature over the subtlety of colour, anticipated much twentieth-century experimentation, including the Rorschach ink-blots and pochoir. Subsequent exhibitions and catalogues ensured that in spite of the often perishable nature of Hugo's materials, his art will not disappear from view.
Notwithstanding these varied contributions, the fact remains that within the current research fields of French studies and of cultural history, it is the novels which dominate. There are several directions that future research might take to redress this inherent imbalance and, in broader terms, to ensure that research on Hugo continues to flourish. First and foremost, translations of Hugo's work into English need to be more readily available. Both Notre-Dame de Paris and Les Misérables come in sound Penguin editions, and were also recently reissued for Barnes and Noble's New Classics series (with signs that they are even considering adding a third Hugo novel to the series), while Harry Guest among others has provided smart translations of Hugo's verse.30 But there is still no single series of Hugo's complete works in English, with non-French readers having to settle for select titles rather than inclusive anthologies. Promisingly, however, the interest shown in the seemingly constant stream of Hugo biographies indicates that his popularity continues to generate a demand for further points of access into his work.31 Hugo scholars in this respect should be thankful to historical studies. Many anglophone colleagues have cemented Hugo's substantial place in nineteenth-century history by highlighting the ways in which he was a visionary social commentator who evoked deep idealism and yet refused to endorse the institutions of the day.32
An English translation project would be an elementary enough enterprise: for the 1985 centenary, the late Jacques Seebacher and Guy Rosa updated the uvres complètes to produce a more thorough and cohesive series with Laffont than had ever been available before. Furthermore, there are two dedicated organizations already in place that could greatly aid such a project. The Société des Amis de Victor Hugo brings together enthusiasts from various cultural backgrounds to organize annual festivals, and since 2003 it has compiled lists of every Hugo-linked event that has taken place both in France and abroad. Matching this more popular interest, the Paris-based Groupe Hugo is composed of Hugo scholars from around France who meet once a month to discuss current research. Created in 1969 by Albouy and relaunched in 1975 at Paris VII under Seebacher and then Rosa, the group maintains a superb website with online archives of meetings and papers dating back to 1986.33
The imperative for translations aside, it is also clear that we need to return more actively to Hugo's own critical thinking if we are to cast the net beyond the novels. Bakhtin's apparent challenge to privilege narrative over verse is by no means beyond question, as it should compel us to think more precisely about Hugo's experimentation with so many different media, and about the possibilities for destabilizing meaning in his work that this experimentation afforded him. A comprehensive response to Bakhtin's argument using Hugo's own thoughts on art and meaning is, in fact, sorely lacking. The potential is nonetheless clearly there, especially as an exciting undercurrent in Hugo studies has concentrated more exclusively on the poet's metaphysics. Hugo's relationship to a philosophical rather than strictly artistic tradition is becoming clearer. Both Mahmoud Aref and Myriam Roman have extensively explored how Hugo's narratives are dramatized by his philosophy of a human existence that is itself vivid in its contrasts.34 Henri Peyre has set out a similar conception of Hugo's thinking, claiming that ‘if France can boast of any great philosophical poetry, it is probably Hugo's rather than Ronsard's’.35 For the bicentenary, historians Henri Pena-Ruiz and Jean-Paul Scot located a Romantic materialism within Hugo's political philosophy: ‘un double sentiment de l'homme à l’égard de la nature, de proximité et d'étrangeté, se convertit en vision cosmique où bientôt viendront s'inscrire les luttes pour la liberté et la justice'.36 However, as I have argued elsewhere, unless the poet's relationship to philosophy is clearly identified as one that resists the rationalist legacy of the Enlightenment rather than perpetuates it, then such approaches may be left unnecessarily vulnerable to criticism and denied the philosophical relevance that they warrant.37
Clarifying this relationship would also link Hugo and the French Romantic movement with emergent trends in English and German studies, whereby Romanticism is being rescued from the stereotype of a self-indulgent aestheticism so as to engage with contemporary discourse on the history of ideas.38 Given the heavy tendency in these other traditions towards poetry, intersections with Hugo's own practices could oblige wider readings of his work that are less focused on his narrative writing than has been the case. This question of potential dialogues between Hugo and other artists is itself highly important to assuring that the former exile of Guernsey does not himself become a remote island of sorts within French studies. It is a question that I myself have already raised in this journal.39 Hugo's place in literary and cultural history would be well served by identifying his relationship to his contemporaries both within and outside France. For example, his implicit reactions to the influence of Darwinism on late-nineteenth-century thinking remain ungauged.
One last aspect of Hugo which would also benefit from fresh initiatives would be his sometimes unhelpful image as a grand homme. The alpha male qualities that Hugo is seen to exert in his literary career tie in neatly with his notorious sexual reputation with women. His combination of talent and boldness both on a page as the poetic voyant and behind closed doors as the sexual viveur has only reinforced the often crude patriarchal likeness that is now so readily associated with him. However, the scope of Hugo studies in emphasizing Hugo's complexities could be reiterated and indeed broadened by probing the overt masculine sexuality that his extraordinary egotism and galanterie are seen to represent. ‘Masculine subjectivities betray internal tensions: there are no homogeneous patterns but rather contradictory desires and shifting boundaries. Masculinities are not fixed but can be renegotiated and unsettled’.40 Such unsettling would be entirely in keeping with the prevalent trends in Hugo studies, whereby various binaries mix into an unsteady hybrid of meaning, rather than become fused into an integrated whole. Hugo's masculine self-interest as regards his personal and literary treatment of women cannot of course be denied, but it can most certainly be complicated so as to bring another rich dimension of analysis to his work.
In responding to these potential ways forward and indeed to the ongoing challenges surrounding Hugo, two basic principles of academic ‘house-keeping’ still require urgent attention: a less disjointed volume of Hugo's general correspondence and a comprehensive index to his complete works. The latter might prove a difficult enterprise, but the former should be more forthcoming, especially when compared to the excellent editions of correspondence available for some of Hugo's contemporaries, such as Alphonse de Lamartine. As we continue to scale French literature's Mont Blanc and to chart the different facets of this immense writer's work, it is only appropriate that the possibilities for Hugo's future, as with the difficulties his work presents, are as manifold as the characteristics of the man himself.41
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Footnotes |
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1 Cocteau, Essai de critique indirecte: le mystère laïc (Paris, Bernard Grasset, 1932), p. 28. It can be argued that Cocteau's edict, much like André Gide's equally notorious ‘hélas!’, has been too readily taken out of context as a sign of absolute contempt, rather than a subtly conciliatory reflection (Gide was responding to a survey asking who was the greatest of France's nineteenth-century poets: L'Ermitage, February 1902, p. 109).
2 ‘Sublime Windbag’, Time Magazine, 27 April 1998 <http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,988238-1,00.html> (accessed 27 February 2008).
3 Scribbled on one of Hugo's school notebooks dated 10 July 1816, as testified by his wife Adèle in her biography, Victor Hugo raconté par un témoin de sa vie (1863), II, in uvres complètes de Victor Hugo XLVIII (Paris, Albin Michel, 1926), p. 6.
4 Flaubert, Correspondance 1859–68, ed. by Jean Bruneau (Paris, Gallimard, 1991), pp. 45–6.
5 Mallarmé, Correspondance: Lettres sur la Poésie, ed. by Bertrand Marchal (Paris, Gallimard, 1995), p. 178.
6 Sand, Lettres d'une vie, ed. by Thierry Bodin (Paris, Gallimard, 2004), p. 990.
7 Horne, Seven Ages of Paris: Portrait of a City (London, Macmillan, 2002), p. 321.
8 Vargas-Llosa, The Temptation of the Impossible: Victor Hugo and ‘Les Misérables’, trans. by John King (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 142.
9 Millet, ‘Actualité de Victor Hugo: réflexions sur le succès du bicentenaire de 2002’, Revista da Universidade de Aveiro: letras, 19/20 (2002–03), 1–13 (p. 8).
10 Millet, ‘Actualité de Victor Hugo’, p. 11.
11 Kathryn Grossman, ‘From Classic to Pop Icon: Popularising Hugo’, The French Review, 74 (2001) 482–95 (p. 484).
12 Sarah Kay, Terence Cave, and Malcolm Bowie, A Short History of French Literature (Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 211.
13 Bénichou, Les Mages romantiques (Paris, Gallimard, 1988), pp. 310–11.
14 Roger Cardinal, ‘Victor Hugo, Somnambulist of the Sea’, in Artistic Relations: Literature and the Visual Arts in Nineteenth-Century France ed. by Peter Collier and Robert Lethbridge (New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 209–21 (219).
15 ‘C'est tout un immense horizon d'idées entrevues [...] entassement d’œuvres flottantes où ma pensée s'enfonce sans savoir si elle en reviendra.': Hugo, Choses vues 1849–85 (Paris, Gallimard, 1972), p. 320.
16 Elliott M. Grant, The Career of Victor Hugo (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1945), p. 337.
17 Barrère, La Fantaisie de Victor Hugo, 3 vols (Paris, José Corti, 1950), III, p. ix.
19 Grant, The Perilous Quest: Image, Myth and Prophecy in the Narratives of Victor Hugo (Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 1968), p. 27.
21 Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. by Hélène Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1968), p. 43.
22 Hugo, ‘Préface de Cromwell’, in uvres Complètes: Critique, ed. by Jean-Pierre Reynaud (Paris, Robert Laffont, 1985), p. 10.
23 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, pp. 11–12.
25 Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1984.
26 See Grossman, The Early Novels of Victor Hugo (Geneva, Droz, 1986), p. 197, and Grossman, Figuring Transcendence in ‘Les Misérables’: Hugo's Romantic Sublime (Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press, 1994). The last instalment of this triptych, looking at the later novels, is forthcoming.
27 Joë Friedemann, Victor Hugo: un temps pour rire (Saint-Genouph, Nizet, 2001); Isabel Roche, Character and Meaning in the Novels of Victor Hugo (West Lafayette, Purdue University Press, 2007).
28 For prominent English-language works in these fields, see Meschonnic, Victor Hugo: un poète contre le maintien de l'ordre (Paris, Maisonneuve, 2002); Ubersfeld, Étude sur le théâtre de Hugo de 1830 à 1839 (Paris, José Corti, 1974); for the prominent English-language works in these fields, see J. C. Ireson, Victor Hugo: A Companion to His Poetry (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1997) and Albert W. Halsall, Victor Hugo and the Romantic Drama (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1998).
29 Graham Robb, Victor Hugo (London, Picador, 1997), p. 390.
30 Guest, The Distance, the Shadows: Victor Hugo, Selected Poems (London, Anvil, 1981).
31 Robb's award-winning study (see n. 29) is the best English-language biography to consult. In French, see Jean-Marc Hovasse, Victor Hugo avant l'exil: 1802–51 (Paris, Fayard, 2001); this is an exciting volume that promises a follow-up, but at around 1400 pages, this first instalment alone is twice the length of Robb's concise yet detailed overview.
32 See Angelo Metzidakis, ‘Victor Hugo and the Idea of the United States of Europe’, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 23 (1994) 72–84, and William Vanderwolk, Victor Hugo in Exile: From Historical Representations to Utopian Vistas (Lewisburg, PA, Bucknell University Press, 2006).
33 See <http://groupugo.div.jussieu.fr>.
34 Mahmoud Aref, La Pensée sociale et humaine de Victor Hugo dans son œuvre romanesque (Paris, Champion, 1979); Myriam Roman, Victor Hugo et le roman philosophique (Paris, Champion, 1999).
35 Peyre, Victor Hugo: Philosophy and Poetry, trans. by Roda P. Roberts (Tuscaloosa, AL, University of Alabama Press, 1990), p. 15.
36 Pena-Ruiz and Scot, Un Poète en politique: les combats de Victor Hugo (Paris, Flammarion, 2002), p. 60.
37 See my arguments in both ‘Victor Hugo, Charles Renouvier and the Empowerment of the Poet-Philosopher’, Dix-Neuf, 9 (2007), 1–16, and ‘A Surreptitious Romantic? Reading Sartre alongside Victor Hugo’, in Sartre's Second Century, ed. by Benedict O'Donohoe and Roy Elveton (Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, forthcoming in 2009).
38 See Philosophical Romanticism, ed. by Nikolas Kompridis (London, Routledge, 2006).
39 Stephens, ‘Reading Walter Benjamin's Concept of the Ruin in Victor Hugo's, Notre-Dame de Paris’, French Studies, lxi:2 (2007), 155–166.
40 Bob Pease, Recreating Men: Postmodern Masculinity Politics (London, Sage, 2000), p. 35.
41 I extend my thanks to those Hugophiles with whom I have been in dialogue with when preparing this article, especially to Andrea Beaghton, Kathryn Grossman, Claude Millet and Guy Rosa.
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